Barış Çağlar

Asst.Professor/Dr. Öğr. Üyesi MEF Univ. Istanbul;
Bilkent Univ. Alumni BA MA PhD

[Barış Çağlar @bar_caglar]

Excited to share my latest: Exceptionalism and Its Discontents: Israel, Iran, and the Crisis of Global Norms https://t.co/MwQBE1rS95

[Wally Rashid @wallyrashid]

Make it very damn clear Marco Rubio is completely in on this invasion of Ceuta.

US Congressional report in April for the first time labels it “occupied Moroccon territory” and “supports Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s efforts on the status of Ceuta”

This is to punish Spain ⬇️

[Gerard Roland. @gerardrolanducb]

My book is finally out with Princeton University Press.

[Barış Çağlar @bar_caglar]

@Mani36555 @Glenn_Diesen The racism accusation often serves to shut down discussion of state responsibility. If Morocco facilitated that, it is hybrid warfare and 'invasion' is not entirely irrelevant.

[Barış Çağlar @bar_caglar]

@orsanoymen1965 Aslında 3 farklı grup var, ilke demokrasi grubu, butlan chpsi ve yeni parti. Soru şu aslında: ulusçuluk bu dönemde chp de kalmayı mı, yeni partiye desteği mi gerektirir? ilke ve demokrasinin gereği mi sizi partide bırakıyor yoksa yeni partidekilerle zihniyet farkınız mı?

[Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape]

For 35 years, the United States has relied on one theory of military power:

Forward bases
Air superiority
Precision strike
Rapid victory
The Iran war may have just broken all four
Read the Thread

[Barış Çağlar @bar_caglar]

@orsanoymen1965 KK ya karşı mücadele edegeldiklerini söylediklerinizin CHP de kalarak mücadele ettiklerini söylemek bir felsefeciye yakışmamış. KK ne zaman altı okçu oldu ki veya CHP de kalarak mücadele imkanı zerre kadar yok ki!Butlanı kabul edenlerle beraber olmaktan nasıl bir mücadele çıkar?

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

JD Vance accuses Israel of 'manipulating' US public opinion to prolong Iran war https://t.co/WklYHhLDiv

[Vali Nasr @vali_nasr]

I write in @FT that Iran’s leaders suspected that the MoU was a temporary retreat by the US, intended to relieve pressure on the global economy and prepare for another round of war.

Iran’s current rulers believe that any display of restraint will only invite further American pressure. To deter the US, and to compel it to negotiate in earnest for an end to the war and a broader nuclear deal that would give Tehran the security and economic relief it craves, they believe Iran has to be aggressive and escalate the conflict beyond what the US is prepared to countenance. The one point of leverage Iran is not prepared to part with is its claim to the Strait of Hormuz and its ability to control access to it. Losing dominance in the strait would leave Iran without any leverage in future negotiations. Iran’s leaders have decided that retaining control of the strait is essential to securing future wins at the negotiating table and ensuring that the US implements the deal rather than walking away from it.

https://t.co/M8etSzdBTM

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A guy named Jonah accidentally built the most useful website on the internet.

It's called Privacy Guides.

This is the website Google would rather you not find, Meta actively lobbies against, data brokers have tried to discredit for years, and the entire advertising industry treats as a direct threat to their business model.

It has been online since 2019. It takes no affiliate money. It runs no ads. Journalists cite it. Security researchers trust it.

Here's how it works.

Privacy Guides is a curated recommendation list. The site itself sells nothing.

It just tells you which private tool actually replaces every surveillance product in your life, tested by security researchers and updated every month, organized into 40+ categories with the exact reason each pick was chosen.

→ Browsers that block trackers and ads by default
→ Email providers that cannot read your messages
→ Search engines that do not build a profile on you
→ Password managers you can self-host
→ VPNs that accept cash and Monero and log nothing
→ Messengers with end-to-end encryption Signal-tier or better
→ Photo apps that do not scan your camera roll
→ Health apps that do not sell your data to insurance companies
→ A custom Android OS called GrapheneOS that strips Google out of your phone entirely

The site is run by a non-profit called MAGIC Grants. Every recommendation goes through a public forum review, a GitHub pull request, and criteria published on the site so anyone can audit why a tool was chosen. No company can pay to be listed. No affiliate link exists on the entire domain.

Google can't shut this down. Meta can't shut this down. Amazon can't shut this down.

The entire $600 billion surveillance advertising industry is built on the assumption that you would never spend one afternoon on this website.

https://t.co/BQJjD1jANC

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

JD Vance recognises that Epstein was likely CIA or Mossad (or both): "He clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest level of Israeli intelligence"

[Seda Demiralp @sedademiralp]

📊Işık Üniversitesi Emotics Lab olarak geliştirdiğimiz Türkiye Toplumsal Dirençlilik Endeksi (TDE), ☑️vatandaşların siyasi ve toplumsal risk algılarını,
☑️bunları ne derece önemsedikleri ve bunlara karşı kendilerini ne derece etkili hissettiklerini, ve
☑️ risklere rağmen kamusal hayattan çekilmeyip söz söylemeye, katılmaya ve etki yaratmaya devam edebilme kapasitelerine işaret ediyor.
TDE'nin ilk bulgularına göre:
📌 Siyasi açıdan en dirençli grup 65 yaş üstü, en kırılgan grup ise 16-26 yaş arası.
📌Siyasi etkisizlik algısı ve siyasi kopuş arasındaki ilişki çok kuvvetli; gençleri angaje edebilmenin yolu, onları etkili hissettirmekten geçiyor.
📌Ani beliren risklerde en yüksek dirençlilik gösterenler kadınlar.
📌Siyasi baskı yükseldiğinde korku genellikle artsa da, bu artış doğrusal değil. Yani, daha fazla saklanmanın marjinal faydası düştüğünde, tam tersi, cesaret artabiliyor.
📈 Diğer bulgular ve analizler için: https://t.co/N5BIzg53gC

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

The popular thinking in NATO is that bringing the war to Russia will force Russia to capitulate. This is based on the false assumption that Russia is fighting an "unprovoked" imperial war. Moscow considers itself to be fighting a defensive war against a NATO determined to use Ukrainians to destroy Russia. From Russia's perspective, a ceasefire is not peace as NATO countries would then send in their troops and military hardware. NATO in Ukraine is considered an existential threat, and the only possible response now for Russia is escalation that may take us to nuclear war. This should be obvious. Sadly, our freedom of speech is in free fall and our populations have been indoctrinated to squeal "Russian propaganda" whenever an argument deviates from NATO-approved narratives

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

MUST READ!

Congressman @RoKhanna after visiting Israel and Palestine:

“In Palestine, I felt first as someone who was brown,” he said. “We really saw the apartheidlike conditions, the inequality.”

He added: “No American would support this if they knew the details of what was going on here.”

https://t.co/PRor7hF8ux

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is pretty insane: if you read the details of this new policy 👇 that now bans scientific collaboration with China, it's entirely driven by the Department of War.

Which means that civilian scientific research in the US is now driven by military logic - something that had basically never been the case since WW2.

I'm not making it up, you can read the new policy of the National Science Foundation for yourself: https://t.co/Bjx8sbIrcW

They explicitly write that the basis for this new prohibition is to be "aligned with the Department of War's approach to collaborations": a civilian science agency - the one that funds most fundamental research in the US - is now openly modeling its policies on the military's. The Pentagon decides who the enemy is, and science falls in line.

It doesn't take a genius to understand how this will backfire. Cancer, for instance, doesn't care about geopolitics. Some of the most promising research in oncology, like every other field, depends on international collaboration (and especially with China who are extremely advanced in cancer research, and most research fields). Putting soldiers in charge of who scientists can talk to is a guarantee that these problems will be harder to solve.

It's also the US repudiating pretty much its entire philosophical approach to scientific research for decades: the notion that science thrives on openness. Even at the height of the Cold War, Reagan - not exactly a peacenik - enacted a directive called "NSDD-189" that stated that fundamental research must remain open and unrestricted.

This is, obviously, the complete opposite direction.

The only precedent I can think of for this is the Wolf Amendment, passed in 2011, which prohibited NASA to engage in bilateral cooperation with China. The result, 15 years later: China is the only country in the world to have its own space station and to have landed on the far side of the Moon.

That's the track record of the policy they now want to extend to all of US science 🤷‍♂️

[Maria Popova @themarginalian]

"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance."

Baldwin's advice on writing (which applies to all creative work): https://t.co/bdAD88YayJ

[José Mario @JoseMarioMX]

Durante años nos repitieron que el futuro era aprender a programar. Que las humanidades eran adorno. Que filosofía, ética y derecho eran cosas lentas para un mundo que iba a vivir de datos, código y velocidad. Pero ahora ocurre algo revelador: los grandes laboratorios de inteligencia artificial están contratando filósofos. No porque se hayan vuelto románticos, sino porque descubrieron que la pregunta más difícil ya no es técnica.

El problema ya no es si una máquina puede escribir, diagnosticar, conducir, resolver, vigilar o decidir. El problema es desde qué idea de verdad, daño, libertad, dignidad y responsabilidad lo va a hacer. Una IA no contesta desde el vacío: trae una arquitectura moral escondida. Puede privilegiar eficiencia sobre derechos, seguridad sobre privacidad, obediencia sobre criterio, propiedad sobre igualdad. Y cuando esa lógica entra a tribunales, hospitales, escuelas, bancos o gobiernos, deja de ser software: se vuelve poder.

Por eso este debate es gigantesco. La pregunta brutal no es si la IA va a pensar por nosotros. La pregunta es quién va a decidir cómo debe pensar. Porque si empresas y gobiernos empiezan a diseñar “constituciones invisibles” para máquinas que ordenan nuestra vida, sin transparencia, sin control democrático y sin responsabilidad jurídica, no estaremos frente al futuro: estaremos frente a una nueva forma de autoridad, más rápida, más elegante, más opaca y mucho más difícil de combatir.

https://t.co/YgYG0iUZrw

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is one of the funnier cultural differences between China and the West: what we respectively see as "healthy food."

In the West, healthy food tends to be raw, cold, and uncooked - think salads, smoothies, raw soups (gazpachos, etc.), cold-pressed juices, etc.

In China, it's almost the opposite: raw and cold foods are generally to be avoided, especially if you have health issues or a weak constitution.

What is seen as healthy is what we in the West could call comfort food: warm soups, congee (porridge), cooked vegetables, stews - everything soft, warm, and easy to digest.

In fact, I'm probably underselling it: cold food in China, especially if you listen to the older more traditional folks, is seen as almost hazardous.

Personal anecdote on this: one of the closest I ever came to having Child Protective Services (CPS) called on me with my kids was at an airport in China when I gave ice water to my then 2-year old daughter.

I did it in front of a group of older Chinese ladies and I heard a collective gasp when my daughter started drinking, as if something genuinely awful had just happened.

The ladies started lecturing me to the effect of "do you realize what you've just done? Ice water to a little child? This is terrible for her digestion! She'll get sick!" Believe me, this was the last time I gave ice water to my daughters in public in China 😅

Why this belief? It comes from Traditional Chinese Medicine (a subject I happen to know a fair amount about because I studied it and I built the largest TCM information website out there in English: https://t.co/GPeMWZcEoE).

Without going too deep in TCM theory, the belief is that cold/raw foods force your body to work harder for digestion, effectively taxing your system instead of nourishing it. Over time this weakens your digestive system, leading to what TCM calls "dampness" and "phlegm".

Ironically, still according to TCM, dampness and phlegm are also the primary explanation for obesity. There's a classic saying: 肥人多痰 (féi rén duō tán) - "fat people have much phlegm." Excess weight in TCM is understood largely as accumulated dampness and phlegm that the Spleen was too weak to properly transform and clear.

Now I'm obviously not saying that TCM believes eating salad makes you fat. It does however slow down, essentially, your metabolism - which is the root cause of weight gain. Quite the irony.

What does modern science have to say on this matter? Is TCM correct that eating raw cold foods isn't that good for you, or are we in the West correct they're the healthiest foods out there?

It may surprise you that science supports the TCM intuition on pretty much every count.

And not in a small way: the scientific consensus is basically that one of the single most beneficial things that ever happened to our species nutrition-wise was to learn to cook food.

Take the book "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham: he argues that cooking made food dramatically more digestible, allowing our ancestors to grow bigger brains and smaller guts - eventually becoming us.

In other words, what science says is that the most important nutritional breakthrough in the history of our species was for us to stop eating the equivalent of salad.

And there are plenty of detailed studies on individual ingredients that back this up. For instance Wrangham in his book demonstrated that cooked eggs are over 90% digestible, while raw eggs are only 50-60% digestible.

Another very famous study is this one by Cornell University (https://t.co/71DNGoLQ86) on tomatoes that concludes that cooking them considerably increases their nutritional value (more antioxidants like lycopene) directly contradicting the notion that raw veggies is more nutritious (that's the actual conclusion of the study, that it goes "against the notion that processed fruits and vegetables have lower nutritional value than fresh produce").

Or take this 1995 study on the effect of cold drinks on digestion (https://t.co/jom8b6G2H7), published in Gut, one of the world's top gastroenterology journals: cold drinks at 4°C significantly suppressed stomach contractions and disrupted normal digestive motility compared to body-temperature drinks.

So those Chinese grandmothers lecturing me at the airport? Science is actually on their side!

Now to be fair there doesn't seem to be much research on the long-term effects of cold and raw food consumption on metabolism - i.e. TCM's claim that it builds "phlegm" and chronically slows your metabolism down, contributing to weight gain. But I wouldn't be surprised if that one was eventually validated too.

Overall conclusion: next time you're virtuously eating a cold kale salad and notice a Chinese grandma looking at you disapprovingly, maybe put the fork down and ask her what she recommends instead.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

Important summary from Axios revealing how critical American fatigue with Israel and foreign military interventions are as drivers of the political earthquake on both the Left and Right:

- The numbers are brutal: Pew Research found 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, including 80% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans under 50.

- For Democrats, Israel's actions in Gaza bundle together everything young left-wing voters hate about the old party: war, money in politics, gerontocracy and deference to a foreign policy consensus they see as morally bankrupt.

- For Republicans, the fight over Israel is also a fight over the future — pitting an aging, pro-Israel establishment against a young base that views foreign intervention as the original sin "America First" was meant to cure.

https://t.co/FoLjR1x1bl

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

"The hardest decision we had to make in completing this report was.. not to name the Palestinian children, whose deaths, injuries & suffering we describe.. we didn't name them because we feared the consequences for their families"

He means Israel would go after them too.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

A UN commission has found that Israel is committing genocide through a "deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza by targeting their children".

The truth always comes out in the end — and we must never, ever let it be forgotten.